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Hi, What do you guys think of Visual Basic? is it wise/advisable to use Visual Basic with Oracle? or is it better if we use Oracle Forms/Reports? Our company has a couple of VB programmers and we'd rather use it for development. However, I'm unaware of any 'gotchas' or issues surrounding it when it comes to VB-Oracle development.

VB is fine. I've done alot of development in VB and Forms and they're both good, but in different ways.

You can knock up a system very quickly in Forms since it's a 4GL, but it's ease of use also makes it less flexible than VB.

These days you can do pretty well anything in VB and it's pretty quick, but it was not designed originally for DB work. Database access is not part of the native language as it is in Forms, you have to use ADO. This isn't a problem but the code doesn't look as elegant as forms.

If you've been used to Forms you'll find the database interaction in VB clumsy but, once you've worked with VB for a while you'll find Forms quite restrictive.

Originally posted by TimHall Database access is not part of the native language as it is in Forms, you have to use ADO.

You haven't.
Look on Oracle Objects for OLE. I've been using it for many years with VB and it works fine.

Sorry, I meant something like ADO, object-based DB connectivity.

I've noticed that OO4O is a little slower than ADO when making DB connections. Once connected it's similar in speed. I know this is the opposite to what Oracle would have you believe but this has been my experience. What about you?

Unfortunately, I can't compare ADO vs. OO4O. I started to use OO4O as an alternative to ODBC and I've never felt need for ADO.
In my experience, time of making DB connection depends on load of server rather on driver type on client. (I mean dedicated server, not MTS). Since our sessions are days long, time of making connection is not so interesting for us.
I personally appreciate OO4O for its ease of use and some nice features (searching dynasets, connection pooling, autobinding of bind variables).
For VB, OO4O is much better than ODBC but I've never met ADO or Forms.
Ales

Robbing TimHall's last question .... what about Java? JDeveloper seems to be very good .... java, java is one of the best languages (seems alot with c++ and has all its funcionallity) and JDeveloper has the database interaction. So, OOP + Complete DB interaction ..... so? I believe it's better than using oracle with any other development tool, what do you guys think? I don't have experience with JDeveloper.